A-List Eyes

Face like a Hollywood autograph
He is gold like sand and green like glass
He moves like the wind through American grass
Everybody stand up to let him pass

A-list eyes and Walk of Fame smile
When he sings you could listen for quite a while
Rolling voice with the Texas style
Just another model on the ageing pile

He’s a diehard son of the church and the steeple
He looks pretty good but so do lots of other people
What’s this on my face, am I starting to weep or
Does he really make me get this feeble?

James Dean boy with the Elvis hair
He acts like he don’t but he knows that we stare
Magazine dream with baseball flair
Edges that melt the surrounding air

Stand up and be an iconoclast
Smash him on the floor cos you know he won’t last
Shards of a smile like a blast from the past
Look up at the altar where the cameras flash

He understands his effect on people
He comes from the country of the church and the steeple
What’s this on my face, am I starting to weep or
Does he really make me get this feeble?

U.S. icon waiting for a raise
Look at him close and you’ll see how he’s made
Mouth like a carousel and eyes like jade
Body like the siren before an air raid

Photograph in a spinning wheel
Swing it round and see how you feel
Kinetic energy with a sweet force field
Negative image of everything real

Here is the church and here is the steeple
Here are the land of the free’s special people
What’s this on my face, am I starting to weep or
Does he really make me get this feeble?
Does he really make me get this feeble?
Does he really make me get this feeble?


Hattie Samuel

Spellbound

Night is tender and I am spellbound.
On this balcony songbirds are all dead.
Could you somehow speak to me on the wind
or perhaps in a telephone call?
I lie and smoke and think of your
hip joints.

With every moan you moved me closer;
with every hand upon leg came my death.
Fumes are lust on my body and
long-legged horses sailed by at half twelve.
If I walked like them, I'd go to your eyelashes

and pluck them. Warm as a tomb I lie
and follow the lines of my mind on Orion.
The nylon earth breathes and I,
I chased Narcissus down the side of a watch.
You stand on a white-blue plain as far away as your eyes.

I could dream suspended by wire.


Hattie Samuel